Ramón Casas

(Spanish, 1866-1932)

Desnudo

Footnotes

Provenance
Private collection, Spain.

The present lot is one of a series of full-length nudes executed by Ramon Casas around 1910. In these works, the artists' models stand at an angle to the viewer, heads tilted and hands arranged in different positions, the figures painted against a muted background. Four of this series were painted to decorate the arches of choir stalls in the Monastery of Sant Benet de Bages, a crumbling 10th century building which the Casas family acquired in 1907. Casas commissioned his friend, the modernista architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch, to undertake the monastery's restoration.

As Isabel Coll observes, the influence of Ingres, the most brilliant of Classical painters, is evident in these works: 'like Ingres, Casas lengthens the figures in search of beauty'.¹ Coll also observes that, while these paintings deserve to be considered as finished works, the poses and attitudes of these nudes can also be seen as experiments for the positioning of the figures in Casas' more formal portraiture; the result of this experimentation is evident in many of the full-length portraits executed between 1911 and 1915.

The treatment of the nude as a subject was visited by Casas at various times in his career. In the mid-1890s, the artist experimented with nude forms in crouching and reclining positions, producing a series of oils which call to mind the sculptural interpretations of Andromeda executed by Rodin in the 1880s. A similar group of posed nudes were painted around 1903.²

We are grateful to Isabel Coll Mirabent for her assistance in cataloguing this lot.

¹ Isabel Coll Mirabent, Catálogo de la Exposición Júlia, El Deseo, Circulo del Liceo, Barcelona, 2016, pp. 138-139.
² Isabel Coll Mirabent, Ramon Casas 1866-1932: Una vida dedicada al arte, Catálogo razonado, Ed. La Cierva, Murcia, 2001, pp. 240-243 & pp. 338-339.